In postwar America, not everyone wanted to move
out of the city and into the suburbs. For decades before World War II,
New York's tenants had organized to secure renters' rights. After the
war, tenant activists raised the stakes by challenging the
newly-dominant ideal of homeownership in racially segregated suburbs.
They insisted that renters as well as owners had rights to stable,
well-maintained homes, and they proposed that racially diverse urban
communities held a right to remain in place--a right that outweighed
owners' rights to raise rents, redevelop properties, or exclude tenants
of color. Further, the activists asserted that women could participate
fully in the political arenas where these matters were decided.

Grounded in archival research and oral history, When Tenants Claimed the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing
shows that New York City's tenant movement made a significant claim to
citizenship rights that came to accrue, both ideologically and legally,
to homeownership in postwar America. Roberta Gold emphasizes the
centrality of housing to the racial and class reorganization of the city
after the war, the prominent role of women within the tenant movement,
and their fostering of a concept of "community rights" grounded in their
experience of living together in heterogeneous urban neighborhoods.

A blurb:

"Is the purchase of a single-family house in the suburbs really the only
route to housing happiness? With vigorous, readable prose Roberta Gold
uncovers the history of an alternative vision. In New York City, leftist
men and women agitated for the rights of renters to build interracial,
affordable, locally-controlled communities of apartment dwellers. As
Americans contemplate the lessons of the last decade's foreclosure
crisis, they would do well to consider the possibilities illuminated in When Tenants Claimed the City." --Amanda Seligman